dc mom/policy wonk's musings on work, parenthood, gender, politics, and the rest of life

October 08, 2009

The NY Times reported this week on a study that looked at the effects of New York City's requirement that chain restaurants post the calorie counts of each item on the menu. The researchers looked at fast food restaurants in high poverty neighborhoods, and compared purchases in New York and Newark. They found that the average purchase in New York was of more calories after the law was in effect than before, while there was no change in Newark.

The article offers a few hypotheses for why this might be the case. One possibility is that shoppers were more interested in a good value than in nutrition. I can testify that, at least for my husband, when we went to Nathans over the summer, the posted calorie counts encouraged him to buy a large drink rather than a small, because he could see that it was more than twice as much beverage for only a dollar more.

I would also suggest, from behavioral economics, that there is probably an anchoring effect from some of the really absurd things on the menu. About 1/3 of those who noticed the calorie signs said that they affected their purchases. Well, people do feel like they took nutrition into account when they pass up the 1,000 calorie triple megaburger with cheese and get the double burger instead.

Some of the people quoted in the article suggests that the calorie postings will have more effect over time. I'd be highly surprised if that were true. My guess is that over time, people will pay less and less attention to the signage.

I also think that the law has less impact because it only applies to chain restaurants. I don't think anyone is surprised to learn that Big Macs are bad for you. I think people would be more surprised by how many calories are in things that sound like they might be healthy. My sense is that most restaurants cook with far more butter and oil than almost anyone uses at home these days.

June 17, 2009

You've probably heard of the "Restaurant Week" promos that happen once a year in a lot of cities -- a bunch of restaurants all agree to offer a limited fixed price menu at the same bargain price for one week a year. It's a nice way to get to try restaurants that are usually out of your price range, and gets the restaurants more customers during a generally slow time of year and lots of publicity and goodwill.

Well, this year Cookie magazine helped organize "Kids Restaurant Week" in three cities, including DC. Adults pay $29, kids pay their age, special early seatings. We generally have given up on going out with the boys to any restaurant fancier than Applebees, because it's just not worth the money to buy food that they won't eat, and it takes too much of our energy to keep them sitting nicely. (Although we've discovered that a pair of bubble teas will buy us a good 45 minutes sitting at the local dim sum joint.) But we decided to give Wasabi a try, since N likes the takeout sushi from Trader Joe's, and I hoped the food on a conveyor belt would distract D even if there was nothing he was willing to eat. And it's right near my office.

We got there a little late, due to some parking issues. (We discovered that our minivan no longer fits in the parking structures downtown since we installed a bike rack. And most metered spots are off limits between 4 and 6.30.) But they were very welcoming when we got there.

It turned out to be far more of a success than I had anticipated. They had a kids meal planned out, with chicken karage, avocado rolls, sweet potato tempura and strawberries with ginger. Somewhat to my surprise, D adored the chicken. And adults could just eat of the conveyor belt or the menu. The boys were thrilled by how the staff turned the standard wooden disposible chopsticks into kids chopsticks with the clever use of a rubberband and the rolled up paper wrapper.

At the end of the meal, the manager (or owner?) stopped by and was very welcoming. He asked where we lived, and when we said Virginia, he told us they were opening a new branch in Tyson's in the fall. He said that would be a more kid-friendly set-up, with more room, and the chefs working on display in the middle.

I wouldn't have imagined taking the boys to Wasabi without the incentive of kids restaurant week, but at the end, they asked if they could go back. And we probably will.

June 02, 2009

This week I'm looking at two of the recent series of books about parenting from a father's perspective. If the female version of these are "momoirs," does that make these "dadiaries?"

Of the two, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood, by Michael Lewis, is the more recent and the more hyped. Lewis is the author of one of the better books I've ever read (Liar's Poker, about the excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s) and so I had high hopes for this book. And it has some really funny moments. But basically, it reads like the slapped together collection of Slate columns that it is. In it we learn that parenting can be absurd, exhausting and messy, but that "If you want to feel the way you're meant to feel about the new baby, you need to do the grunt work. it's only in caring for a thing that you become attached it."

I'd actually be interested in reading a book by Lewis in which he uses his journalistic talents to look at the contested territory of parenting in the 21st century, because he does nail some issues: "For now, there's an unsettling absence of universal, or even local, standards of behavior. Within a few miles of my house I can find perfectly sane men and women who regard me as a Neanderthal who should do more to help my poor wife with the kids, and just shut up about it. But I can also find other perfectly sane men and women who view me as a Truly Modern Man and marvel aloud at my ability to be both breadwinner and domestic dervish -- doer of an approximately 31.5 percent of all parenting. The absence of standards is the social equivalent of the absence of an acknowledged fair price for a good in a marketplace. At best, it leads to haggling; at worst, to market failure."

In order to do this, Stracher started working from home a few days a week, and eventually wound up quitting one of his two jobs, and thus having more time to coach his kid's teams, and generally be part of their lives. Stracher acknowledges that everything he does would be unremarkable almost anywhere but in the suburbs of New York City, but he also doesn't downplay the difficulty in changing patterns of behavior when he works a two-hour train ride from home, he's expected to travel regularly for work, and all of the kid-focused activities are scheduled for at-home-parents.

The other major theme of the book is Stracher's desire to cook "real" (e.g. grown up) food for his family, and his frustration when his kids turn up their nose at it again and again. He writes with passion about the pleasure of feeding people you love, and how easy it is to put undue weight on it. (I know that one of the reasons I make waffles and muffins so often is they're pretty much the only things I can make that the kids will appreciate the effort.) He's not the elegant writer that Lewis is, but I think I enjoyed this book more.

Tofu isn't kosher for Passover by traditional Ashkenazi standards, because it's made from beans, which are "kitniyot" -- not really leaven, but sort of guilty by association. (Either because you can make bread-like foods out of them, or because they were grown in adjacent fields, not clear.) A couple of years ago, I decided that worrying about kitniyot wasn't particularly meaningful to me -- I won't eat cornbread, but I'm not going to worry about corn syrup, or tofu.

Quinoa's a different issue. Although it sure looks like a grain, biologically, it's a member of a different family. More to the point, it's a new world plant, and was totally unknown to the rabbis who wrote the laws about Passover. So it's kosher for Passover, even for those observe the prohibition on kitniyot.

They say that these have less fat than the standard Haagen Dasz flavors, but this is still a premium ice cream, coming in at 220-240 calories for a 1/2 cup serving (and my guess is that most people probably treat the 14 ounce packages as a 2 serving package, if they don't eat the whole thing). That said, it's very good ice cream. Ginger was probably my favorite flavor of the ones we tried, D liked the passionfruit best, and N liked them all.

So, what am I doing eating ice cream if I'm on a diet? Well, they're rich enough that a little goes a long way. I served myself a big bowl of fruit and put a dollop of ice cream on top. The passionfruit ice cream was amazing with the mango chunks from Trader Joe's, and the ginger, mint and brown sugar all went well with strawberries. As Pollan says, "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

April 07, 2009

This January, I got back from vacation and hopped on the scale, and was horrified to see a number that I had previously only seen when pregnant -- yes, I really did weigh more than I did immediately postpartum. It shouldn't have surprised me -- all my pants were too tight. Somewhere along the way, I had added an extra 10 pounds to the usual "I could really stand to lose 10 pounds." So I started looking around for a diet plan that I could follow. I'm pretty skeptical of diets, but I also know that all of these "lifestyle" approaches that claim that you can lose weight effortlessly by making simple substitutions don't work for me, because I already drink skim milk, don't drink soda, rarely have chips, etc.

Roberts goes through a whole explanation of the different "instincts" that make us overeat, but fundamentally, the diet is about eating a nutritionally balanced diet, restricting calories, and using a bunch of "tricks" so that you don't feel deprived and hungry along the way. So, you eat lots of soup and salad, because they're high volume. You put the most fattening flavorful things on the outside (chocolate on strawberries, dressing on salad) so you maximize the taste punch. You eat mostly whole grain or high fiber carbs so they digest slowly and make you feel full. You eat a wide variety of veggies, but rotate through a limited set of main dishes, and have a choice of a starch with dinner or dessert, but not both.

The book includes both recipes and suggestions for how to follow the diet using mostly packaged foods. In general, the recipes are quite good -- the thai peanut dressing for salad is amazing, and all the soups have been good enough that I'd make them even when I wasn't trying to watch my weight. However, the "pizza" base was all but inedible -- possibly because I couldn't find the white wheat bran she recommended anywhere, either online or looking at health stores. But the no-cook alternative is to use a low-carb pita bread, which worked out ok for me. I thought the "I-diet bread" was awful the first time I had it, but it's grown on me over time. (And one of Roberts' instincts is indeed familiarity.)

So, I don't think the diet is perfect, but it's working for me. And the Amazon reviews are overwhelmingly positive. This may be the best diet book you've never heard of.

Sorry, this post is attracting too much spam. I'm going to close it to comments.

December 21, 2008

After two years of making really complicated cakes for the office dessert contest (a golden cage and then a 7 layer cake), this year I decided to do something easy. I made the eggnog variation of the New York Times' Brandy Alexander Pie. And no, I still didn't win, but I didn't feel like I should have.

Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and a Joyous Solstice. I probably won't be posting again until after the New Year. Stay warm, have fun, don't spend too much, take lots of photos, and I'll be back next year.

November 19, 2008

I was fascinated by this story in the NY Times about how the demand for Spam has risen as the economy gets worse. What it tells me is that there's a lot of people who consider meat -- even in the form of highly processed parts -- essential to their diet.

Even if I ate pork, I can't imagine ever buying Spam. If I don't have the money for regular meat, I'd rather eat vegetarian meals than Spam. (Yes, I do occasionally eat beef hot dogs, which are only marginally closer to the "real meat" side of the spectrum.)

As I've said before, I think that my willingness to do without meat is a large part of the reason that we didn't have trouble doing the Thrifty Food Plan experiment. The market basket that the plan is based on includes allowances for a reasonable amount of meat -- for an adult male, they assume 0.63 pounds of beef/pork/lamb and 2.55 pounds of poultry per week. (The equivalent numbers are actually slightly higher for adult women.) When we were following the TFP budget, we were eating significantly less meat than that.

The TFP is overall an interesting construct. It's designed to be low-budget, to meet all the RDIs for nutrients, and to follow the food pyramid, but it's also based on what low-income people actually eat. It's not a fully artificial construct of "how little could one spend and still have a nutritionally adequate diet." So, no, they don't expect you to eat oatmeal, eggs and lentils day after day. And it includes a fair amount of convenience foods. (Although they do note that they were unable as a result to get down to the recommended levels of sodium consumption, even assuming no added salt at the table.)

So what about you? If you're not a vegetarian, do you feel deprived without meat? What substitutes are acceptable and what are not?

July 30, 2008

The tomatoes I planted this year did even worse than last year. A few of the plants just got drowned in the torrential rains shortly after I transplanted them, and the one plant that got big and healthy hasn't produced much in the way of fruit. I don't really get enough sun here for tomatoes, but I can't help myself.

Today, we finally had a ripe tomato, and I let N pick it. He came in with it and asked "Can we make First Tomato soup?" This was, of course, a reference to one of the Voyage to the Bunny Planet books* by Rosemary Wells** where in the day that should have been, Claire gets to pick the first ripe tomato and her mother makes her First Tomato soup.

I couldn't resist a request like that, but I also didn't want to waste one of my few homegrown tomatoes on something that could just as well be made out of store-bought tomatoes. And I strongly suspected that neither of the boys would actually eat whatever I made. So after a few minutes of googling, I made the simplest soup possible -- tomato, olive oil, and salt, pureed together without cooking. D refused to taste it and N had just a few bites, but T and I enjoyed it.

*In each of these books, a young bunny has a terrible day, and then the Bunny Queen takes them to the Bunny Planet, where they get to experience the day that should have been. Each of the days gives the child what they were really missing -- quiet and solitude, parental attention, warmth and affection. The link is to a book that contains all three stories, but if you can find the out-of-print box set in a used bookstore or yard sale for less than the unreal prices being asked by Amazon sellers, I'd vote for that. The books are larger than the classic Sendak Nutshell Library but only about half the size of a standard paperback and there's something about the small books fitting into their own little case that is absolutely irresistible for preschoolers.

July 27, 2008

The obvious problem with high food prices is that they mean that people on the edge eat less, and often poorer quality food. Food is one of the most flexible part of the budget for most people -- in the short term, you can't reduce your rent, but you can skip a few meals, or see if the local food pantry can help you out. There's a study that shows that poor families eat less in cold winters, when utility bills are especially high.

So what's good about high food prices? Let's start by thinking about the parallel question for gas. I don't think that high gas prices are unambiguously bad. While I worry about the effect on low-income folks, especially in rural areas, I think high gas prices generally send the right economic signals: buy more fuel-efficient cars, use more carpools and mass transit, think about the costs of commuting when you decide where to live. I'd like to see more of the cost of gas going into funding things like better mass transit, and less going to enrich oil companies and OPEC, but that's a different issue.

So, is there something parallel for food? Well, a big part of why food in the US is so cheap is that energy has been cheap. When Michael Pollen says that the US food economy runs on corn, he could just as easily say it runs on oil -- in the form of fuel for tractors and combines, in the form of fertilizer (which is largely made from petroleum), in the form of the fuel for the trucks that move the corn from farm to processing plant to grocery store. So, it's hard to imagine how food prices could stay as low as they've been in a world of higher energy prices.

It's also likely that the relative costs of different kinds of food will change. Bananas may be more expensive compared to apples, free range chicken may only cost twice as much as factory farmed chicken, rather than five times as much. Some things that have been unsustainably cheap will be more expensive, and that might be a good thing.

But, none of this makes the basic problem of low-income people not being able to afford food go away. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been doing a lot of thinking about how to make sure that low-income households are protected in the context of climate change legislation that will increase energy costs -- basically, the idea is that if the government auctions off all carbon permits, rather than assuming that companies are entitled to permits at the left that they currently pollute, it generates enough money to provide generous refunds to low and moderate income households. I'm not sure what the food equivalent of that is.

June 29, 2008

In the final week, we wound up doing three grocery trips, to Costco, Trader Joe's, and Giant, for a total of $173.75 for the week, and $460.78 for the month. Some of the high spending this week is because we stocked up on stuff that will last until the next month, but we also bought more packaged goods -- a big thing of nutrigrain bars for D to take as snacks at camp, string cheese, ice cream -- and D even convinced T to buy "orange chicken" at Costco. So, it's easy to see that it would be easy to blow past the $501 thrifty food plan budget if you weren't really watching. The bars are a lot cheaper at Costco than at the regular grocery store, but they're still far more expensive than baking.

As it happens, this week we're going to get our first delivery from South Mountain Creamery. Since I read The Way We Eat, I've been wanting to move away from industrially produced meat and dairy, and this looks like a way to do so without adding yet another set of shopping trips to our lives. It's not cheap, but it's a better price than the comparable foods from Whole Paycheck. I'm interested in seeing whether we can taste the difference.

June 22, 2008

This week we did only one shopping trip, spending $58.56, to bring us to a total for the month so far of $286.95. Then we went out of town for three days, taking the bus to New York. I don't know how to account for that in this experiment. On the one hand, my brother and parents fed us several meals, which helped out the budget. On the other hand, we spent about $60 on restaurant meals...

So why are we finding it relatively easy to stay within the Thrifty Food Plan, when by all accounts, people on Food Stamps are struggling badly to cope with rising food prices? My guess is that there are several things going on:

First, most people on Food Stamps are working, and thus receive less than the maximum monthly benefit. In theory, Food Stamps aren't supposed to pay for all their food -- they're supposed to use some of their cash income for food as well. But low-income families have many other demands on their income (if I remember correctly, about half are spending 50 percent or more of their income just on housing). Food is the easiest part of the budget to squeeze, particularly if you're willing to invest the time in going to food pantries.

Second, we have a car, and so can travel to low-cost supermarkets and warehouse stores. And we can have enough cash to buy large quantities when they're on sale.

Third, we're eating very little meat, and relatively little processed food. We often make a big batch of pancakes or waffles on the weekend, and reheat them for breakfast all week, which is a lot cheaper than breakfast cereal.

June 15, 2008

This week we spent $132.41 on groceries, bringing us to $228.39 for the month. That included a trip to Costco, where we got out for under $100 -- but barely. Some of the things we bought (like a double package of peanut butter) will certainly last us longer than the month, but we've also been eating things that we bought before the start of the month, so I think it more or less balances out. But, of course, if I was really worried about running out of food before the end of the month, I'd be less willing to buy things like the extra-large bag of chocolate chips. (T has been on a cookie-baking kick since we finished our kitchen renovation. It's probably more expensive than buying generic cookies at the supermarket, but cheaper than the brand name packages.)

We've been eating very little meat, but that's not unusual for us, so we're not feeling deprived by that. But blueberries don't seem to have reached their usual seasonal low price, and I'm reluctant to spent $4 on a pint that N will finish off in an afternoon. We did go strawberry picking this morning, and got about 7 pounds of berries. Even if I add the cost of gas to their price, that was quite the bargain.

June 07, 2008

One week into our new attempt at following the thrifty food plan, we've spent $95.98 on groceries. That includes a big shopping trip to Grand Mart (big Asian grocery store, with very low prices on produce) where we stocked up on veggies, and three separate trips to Harris Teeter, which is the closest supermarket. We went there to get ingredients that we couldn't find at Grand Mart, then to get cookies for D's class party when we didn't have power and couldn't bake them as planned (electric oven), and then to get milk and jelly. The good news is that we didn't have to throw out any food due to the power outage.

We're a bit ahead of budget, but we're out of chicken nuggets, and so are likely to hit Costco this week. And we rarely leave there spending less than $100...

It's super hot now (high 90s) and supposed to stay that way for the rest of the week. Some of the things that I had planned on making require the oven to be on, which doesn't seem like a reasonable plan at the moment.

June 01, 2008

The recent discussion of budgeting and how we're dealing with rising prices inspired me to revisit my experiment of trying to stick to the thrifty food plan for a month. This gives us a budget of $501 a month. (Note that this is different from the Food Stamp Challenge which asked politicians to live for a month on the average monthly benefit of about $90 a person a month. The average benefit is significantly lower than the maximum benefit, because most Food Stamp recipients have earnings, and their benefits are reduced as a result -- they're not really expected to feed themselves with only their Food Stamps.)

As before, I'm only looking at actual expenditures, not trying to allocate a cost to the food that's in our pantries and fridge as we begin. That said, we were totally out of milk this morning.

T stopped at Trader Joe's this afternoon, and our first grocery bill for the month comes in at $21.53, including two gallons of milk at $3.69 each, pizza dough and sausage for pizza later in the week, "Sir Strawberry Juice" and a couple of odds and ends. By contrast, 3 years ago when we did this before, on the first day we paid $2.45 and $3.05 for two gallons of milk (at Costco, but still...).

update: for another view of inflation, check out this NY Times graphic (via Visualizing Economics). Shows you both where the average consumer spends the most money, and what's getting more expensive (and what isn't).

May 27, 2008

With energy and food prices both climbing, one of my regular readers suggested that I ask all of you all what adjustments you're making. Are you reducing your driving? Cutting coupons? Reducing meals out? Saving less? And how much are these adjustments hurting? Do you feel like it's a big sacrifice, or something you hardly notice?

Really paying attention to turning out lights, unplugging appliances when not in use.

Taking the bus to NYC instead of driving (the parking costs in NYC were killing us)

Generally asking "do we really need this" before buying stuff -- especially in the $20 to $50 range, which doesn't feel like big spending, but adds up fast.

I can't say we've really cut back on our day to day driving -- I was already driving to the metro, rather than downtown, and the bus is really more of a hassle than the additional savings justify. (It's a bit slower than driving, but real problem is that the low frequency makes missing the bus a disaster, so you have to build in huge margins for error.) I'm actually sort of dubious about these stories about how so many people are shifting from cars to buses. I'm not disputing the fact that public transit systems are seeing big percentage increases in ridership -- but we're starting from such a low base that if only a few percent of drivers shift to buses, that can be a 30 or 40 percent increase in bus ridership.

I just put in a low-flow showerhead, but that was really an environmental choice rather than a frugal one. Overall, we've done a lot to improve the efficiency of our house -- new windows, new boiler (we have baseboard heating), high efficiency washer and dryer, high
efficiency kitchen appliances. Over the long run, these will save money, but for now, we've been writing a lot of big checks for them.

In the short run, things will be better for the next few months, as we won't have to pay for N's preschool, and have already paid for camp for the boys. But then he's going 5 days a week instead of 3 next year, so that will cost about an extra $200 a month. But then
after next year we'll be done with preschool and will feel rich.

Several years ago, I read an article on Money.com called the "60 percent solution" in which they argue that you should keep your fixed expenses down to 60 percent of your take-home income. (I see I wrote about Warren and Tyagi's version of this plan two years ago). If you were doing that before the recent run-up in prices, you're probably giving up some of your extras, but you don't have to do anything drastic. If 80 or 90 percent of your paycheck was already allocated to fixed expenses, there's not a lot of room to adjust.

The reason I thought the 60 percent solution article was interesting was that it recognized that it's really hard to save significant amount of money by shaving your grocery bill. Some of us never spent $5 a day on fancy coffees in the first place, and so can't find savings by giving them up. Instead of squeezing at the margin, it may be better to bite the bullet and look for big changes to make -- a smaller house or apartment, taking in a roommate, finding a second job.

May 22, 2008

It appears that Congress overrode the President's veto on (most of) the Farm Bill today. (Due to a clerical error, the bill that was sent to Bush omitted an entire title -- earlier today, it looked like they might have to pass the whole bill over again, but apparently they've decided that they can override the veto on what was sent to him today, and deal with the last title after the Memorial Day recess.)

The bad news is that the bill continues huge subsidies for agribusiness, at a time when commodity prices are at record highs. The good news is that it contains some real improvements for the Food Stamp program (now to be called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) -- increasing the average benefit by increasing the amount of income that is assumed to be needed for purposes other than food, allowing more child care expenses to be deducted, allowing the employment and training program to help people buy the equipment and uniforms they need to start a job, adjusting the asset limit for inflation over time. There's also more money for WIC (which is *not* an entitlement, and can run out of money when lots of people apply.)

I'm more on the FRAC side of this argument. While this is definitely a bill I need to hold my nose to support, I don't see any other way that we could have gotten the nutrition title improvements. While the White House may not have actively opposed these improvements, they sure weren't going to put pressure on wavering Republicans to support them in a freestanding bill.

The process of unpacking our supplies into the new kitchen did make me aware of just how many spices, oils, etc I've accumulated. Sometimes it's because I try a new recipe that requires a new ingredient, but as often it's because I see something interesting in the Asian grocery and decide to give it a try. Unfortunately, given the constraints on my time, I'm afraid that buying new ingredients is as likely to be a substitute for cooking as an inspiration...

This recipe for Clean the Freezer Chili inspired me to make a batch of chili myself, with the rule that I could only use ingredients that I had on hand. I don't stock tempe, so I used bulgar cooked in canned crushed tomato as the base. I had an open jar of mole sauce, so that went in. What else? Black beans, ancient sun-dried tomatoes, veggie stock, green peppers, fresh tomatoes, onions, celery. Chili powder, cumin, paprika. I thought the result was just ok -- a bit too salty for my taste, but T. liked it, and thought it was surprisingly "meaty" for veggie chili.

March 23, 2008

I return from my blog hiatus with a burning question... pretty much literally. It's about spatulas -- the kind with the flat blade that you use for turning pancakes and moving the onions you're sauteeing around, as opposed to the kind you use for scraping bowls or icing cakes. In packing up our kitchen, I discovered that we have three of these, and on all of them either the handle or the blade has been melted.

So, I'm thinking that when our new kitchen is done, I might splurge on a new, unmelted spatula. But I'd like it to stay that way for a while. And I want it not to destroy nonstick pans. So, any recommendations? We do have a couple of silicone spatulas, but they seem to be more in the cake icing and batter scraping families. Do they make them with the offset handles, and rigid enough to use for pancakes?

February 22, 2008

For Christmas, my in-laws gave me The Sneaky Chef, by Missy Chase Lapine. This is one of the two cookbooks that came out last fall with recipes for how to hide vegetable purees in a variety of foods to get a little more nutrition into kids. (The other one was Deceptively Delicious, by Jessica Seinfeld, and there was some discussion over whether she stole the other person's idea, and got a lot more attention because of who she's married to.)

I'm not morally opposed to sneaking vegetables into my kids' food -- I've been known to put pureed black beans into brownies when I was desperate to get some fiber into D's diet -- but I haven't actually used the cookbook very much. The main problem is that both cookbooks (I took the Seinfeld one out of the library at some point to compare) assume that all kids will eat things like macaroni and cheese and tomato sauce, and D won't. When you're talking about a kid who eats his peanut butter without jelly and doesn't like ketchup, there's not a whole lot of opportunities to disguise food. A few weeks ago, I did make sweet potato puree when I was making sweet potatoes for myself, but then I never got around to using it before it got all yucky and moldy in the fridge.

So, this morning, since the boys had off from school and I decided to work from home rather than hazard the ice, D asked if I'd make pancakes. So I decided to try the chocolate chip pancake recipe, which involves a mixture of white and whole wheat flour, wheat germ, and ground almonds. I made some with chocolate chips, some plain, and some with blueberries.

Both boys loved the chocolate chip ones. Neither would eat the blueberry ones -- and N usually adores blueberry pancakes. They said the plain ones were ok, but not as good as my usual ones. So, is it worth it to add the chips as a bribe to get them to eat some extra whole grains and protein? Maybe occasionally, and especially if the alternative is bisquick, which is pretty low in nutritional content. But Julia's Oatmeal Buttermilk pancakes have just as much whole grains, and taste a heck of a lot better.

Oh, and having a book called "The Sneaky Chef" isn't so sneaky once you have a kid who is old enough to read the title and ask what's the ingredient he's not supposed to notice.

September 09, 2007

One of the tastes that has always meant fall for me is Marian Burros' plum torte. You can make it with regular plums, but it's really meant to be made with the little Italian prune-plums, which are one of the few fruits that still seems to be seasonal -- they're only available in late August and September. (And they seem to be much harder to find in the DC area than in New York -- maybe because there's not much of an Italian population here?)

The recipe appeared almost every year in the NY Times when I was growing up, until one year Burros finally wrote that this was the last time, and if you wanted it, you should cut it out for cripessake. (The Times reprinted it again a year or two ago.) It's one of the few cakes I can remember my mother baking (she's an excellent cook, but has never been particularly into baking) and one that I've made dozens of times. It's delicious, incredibly easy to make, and travels well, so it's perfect for a potluck.

This summer, Cook's Illustrated ran a recipe for a Rustic Plum Cake that is based on Burros' recipe. But they didn't like the cake base, so added ground almonds (and reduced the butter slightly) and they poached the plums in a bit of jam. Sounded interesting. So when I saw a 5 pound box of Italian prune-plums at Costco last week, I knew what I was baking.

The Cook's Illustrated version is good. But I like the old version too. I found the almond taste a bit overpowering -- I think I might use the ground almonds, but pass on the almond extract. And I don't think the extra flavor of the cooked plums was enough to justify the extra effort, and additional dirty pot.

August 20, 2007

I had started to hear good things about Wegman's even before they opened their two Northern Virginia stores, and last week I finally got a chance to go over and check one out. Some reactions:

Their prepared food looks beautiful, but I just can't justify the cost.

If I ate more organic foods, or shopped at Whole Foods now, they'd seem cheap by comparison. But I don't.

I like the way all the fruit is labeled "ripe today" or "ripe in a few days." T. has admitted that he hates it when I just put "fruit" on the shopping list, because he's not good at judging what looks good. Wegman's might make it easy even for him.

I did manage to bring home some sort of melon other than the honeydew I thought I had chosen. It looked like a honeydew on the outside, but was orange like a cantaloupe on the inside, and the taste was also somewhere between the two.

The fig "cake" with dark chocolate is really yummy. It would be a heck of a Passover dessert if you don't require the hecksher.

Their big advantage over Trader Joe's or Grand Mart is that they also carry a good range of "regular" supermarket items, so you wouldn't need to make another stop to get the 2 or 3 things on your list that they don't carry.

The one thing I bought there that I can't seem to find elsewhere in the area is bagels that actually chew like bagels.

Will I go back? Probably not unless I'm heading out that way for something else or am hosting a party. (Although I suspect it's not as hard to get to if you know where you're going -- I succeeded in flummoxing the GPS system in the car I was borrowing, as the address wasn't in its database.) But the preschool where N will be going is about half way between Wegmans and our house, so I might ask T to get me some bagels.

**************On another note, via US Food Policy, I found these amazing pictures of families and their food. I was struck by the ubiquity of Coca-Cola in all but the poorest countries.

June 14, 2007

These trains are awfully popular. Pretty much every kid I know has some.

They're expensive, and they're made of wood, so they have an old-fashioned aura. People aren't surprised that the cheap plastic crap from the dollar store is made in China or Mexico, but they don't expect the stuff that's $15 for a little train to come off the same assembly line.

Realistically, I don't think there's a need to panic, unless your kid has been walking around sucking on James all day. While it's clearly a bad thing, all of us who grew up when leaded gasoline was in common use got exposed to much higher levels of lead.

(Don't worry, I will check our train bins to see if we have any that are affected -- I think all of ours are older than 2005, though.)

But it does highlight how interconnected -- and how vulnerable -- we all are in this global economy. There's really no way to avoid it. The part of that NPR story on the food supply that struck me the most is that China produces 80 percent of the world's Vitamin C. Unless you're going to go try to play Robinson Crusoe somewhere, you can't avoid it.

February 27, 2007

Today I'm reviewing two books that were sent to me by their publishers. Both are about health and disease prevention, and have a forward or introduction (what's the difference?) by the authors of YOU: The Owner's Manual. One focuses on kids, while the other is organized decade by decade, from pre-natal to "the eighth decade and beyond." Both of them basically tell you to exercise regularly, eat your veggies, and wear sunscreen.

First up is the book about kids: Good Kids, Bad Habits: The RealAge Guide to Raising Healthy Children, by Jennifer Trachtenberg, MD. The email I got offering me the book showed the cover, which has the title spelled out in refrigerator magnets, with a carrot and some broccoli magnets thrown in for good luck, so I knew it was likely to push some buttons for me. As long-term readers of this blog know, I have some issues around nutritional advice for parents -- I know darned well what a healthy diet looks like, and that my older son's diet isn't quite making it to Planet Power but have more or less accepted that we can only control what we offer him, not what he eats.

So, when I got the book, I was predictably irritated by the blithe assumptions that involving children in food prep and cutting food into fun shapes would be enough to win over a picky eater. But I was somewhat surprised (and pleased) to see that the book covers far more than nutrition, covering topics from good hygiene (wash your hands, floss your teeth) to safety (buckle your seatbelt, wear a bike helmet) and emotional well-being (spend one on one time with kids, develop relationships with extended family). Overall, the book offers pretty solid, standard advice.

My fundamental concern about the book is who is the audience for it. It seems to me like the sort of well-educated middle-class parents who are likely to buy this book will generally know almost everything that's in it already. Certainly, that seems to be the conclusion of the parentbloggers who have reviewed it. Anxious new parents might buy it, but relatively little of the book is about babies. Maybe it could be a text for a parenting class? Or you could give it to grandparents who might listen to a doctor about seat belts more than to their children? I don't know. I find it pretty hard to imagine anyone reading the book cover to cover.

The chapter on young children suffers from the problem that they've only got 38 pages to cover a huge developmental range. So Alvarez makes no attempt to discuss the full range of health issues, but rather goes through a checklist of topics that you might have heard about in the news -- cord blood, circumcision, vaccines, autism, ADD.

The chapter on 30-something adults has a different problem, that there are very few health problems that are unique to this age group. So instead you get a bland discussion of nutrition, skin care, and urinary tract infections, and then a laundry list of ailments that (fortunately) relatively few people in this age group are actually likely to experience, from cervical cancer to MS.

Fundamentally, I think the decade by decade organization just doesn't work. Good preventative habits don't really change that much from decade to decade, and the litany of diseases would have worked better in simple alphabetical order. The only people I could imagine reading this book cover to cover are hypochondriacs looking for new diseases to obsess about.

Also, the writing/editing was sloppy. For example, from the circumcision discussion: "The AAP also found that the risk of penile cancer in an uncircumcised man is three times more likely than in a circumcised man, though penile cancer is rare in the United States, just one in one hundred thousand males has it." Someone get this man a semicolon.

February 01, 2007

The blog world is buzzing over the story of the family who got kicked off of an AirTran flight because the little girl wouldn't sit in her seat and so the flight couldn't take off. Assuming that the story is being reported more or less accurately, I basically agree with Mir. I can't promise you that my kids won't make noise, but I can get them in their seats. And most of the parents commenting at On Balance seemed to agree as well. But a few seemed to take it as an opportunity to vent their spleen about crying kids, which is a different story entirely. Yeah, I'd rather not be trapped in an airplane with a crying kid too, but you don't always get what you want. Trust me, the parents are even less happy about it than you are.

As it happens, we're flying AirTran this weekend to attend a family event. My boys are both quite excited about flying, and I'm hopeful that they'll be reasonably well behaved. D's been on a 16 hour flight, so an hour and a half shouldn't be a problem. But of the 4 times that N has flown in his life, he's thrown up on two of them. We're bringing a big box of wipes and extra clothes, but is there anything else we should be doing? Is there a nonprescription anti-airsickness drug that is safe for kids and actually works?

I've learned about a local farm that sells grass-fed beef and lamb and makes deliveries nearby. After reading The Omnivore's Dilemna, I want to give this a try. But I have no idea what to get that a) won't bankrupt us and b) will give us a sense of why it's worth the extra money and hassle. Here's the price list -- what should I get and how should I cook it?

I've mostly stopped worrying about my stats, but I happened to take a look at them this afternoon and discovered that I got over 2,000 hits on Monday, which is about 4 times what I usually get and more than 2 times my previous high. I think it's because of this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This is far more than the increase in hits I got last year when quoted in the NY Times. I think the difference is that the Post-Intelligencer used a hotlink to the post it referred to, which the Times never does.

December 17, 2006

We had our big almost-annual Hanukah party yesterday. (Almost annual because there have been a few years when we haven't had the energy to make it happen.) We wound up with a nice mix of people, none of whom knew each other -- which I think actually makes for a better party than ones where some people know each other and others don't know anyone but us. At one point when the RSVPs were trickling in, I thought that no one Jewish but us was going to attend, but Jews wound up being about 1/3 of the attendees.

As always, I wound up wishing that I had more time to talk with everyone. That's true about throwing parties in general, but is even more true for our Hanukah parties, where one of us is pretty much always in the kitchen working on the latkes. I just don't think they taste as good made in advance and kept warm in the oven.

We made both standard latkes and the curried sweet potato ones from Jewish Cooking in America. For my standard latkes, I grate both potatoes and onions in the food processor, and don't even bother peeling the potatoes. Instead of adding matzoh meal, I use instant mashed potatoes to soak up the extra liquid. I tried making a batch on the griddle, but the insides weren't getting as cooked as I think they should be, so we then reverted to the high-greese method. (I may try Elswhere's idea of parboiling the potatoes some time, which might make the griddle work better. (via Crunchy Granola) The sweet potato ones are really good, and also have the advantage that they're not competing with the platonic ideal of latkes that you grew up with.

Tonight we went to our congregation's Hanukah party, and had some amazing latkes. The cooks said that their tricks are to a) squeeze out all the excess liquid through cheesecloth and b) separate the eggs and beat the whites until stiff before adding them back to the mixture. My mother always squeezed out the liquid, which makes for lovely crispy latkes. But it's an awful lot of work for a crowd.

My boys are not the paragons of restraint that Phantom's kids are, but they're doing reasonably well. When D started to pout over not getting to open ALL his presents on Friday night, we told him that he was making it hard for us to have a happy Hanukah, and he did a pretty impressive job of controlling his attitude. And when N opened his present from my folks tonight, he told me that he's always wanted a blue robe with clouds and moons. (Yes, we've been reading A Pocket for Corduroy; how did you guess?)

I seem to have relaxed a good bit about the whole Christmas thing this year. I've decided that I'm not allowed to complain about the public school teaching "Santa Claus is coming to town" in music class when I've shown the boys Miracle on 34th Street (the original, of course). I'm more disturbed that the celebration of holidays around the world scheduled for this week includes "America, Israel, Mexico and Africa" as countries. D got a reprimand for talking too much in class on Friday; he was trying to explain to his classmates that Santa Claus wasn't going to come to our house for Hanukah.

December 11, 2006

My office's holiday party is Wednesday. There's a dessert competition. We had to sign up last week with what we were going to make. Of course, I forgot to look in my cookbooks to figure out what I wanted to make, so I signed up for the cake that I look at every time I open The Cake Bible, but never have made -- the golden cage.

When I got home and looked at the recipe, I remembered why I've never made it. It's a golden genoise, frosted with apricot icing, and then covered with a caramel cage:

Nothing in making it was all that difficult (although it would be hard to make without a cooking thermometer), but it's a lot of steps. For the icing alone, you have to make the apricot puree, a creme anglais, and an italian merengue, and then blend it all together with a pound of butter. The cage -- which looks so impressive -- is actually quite easy and fun.

November 30, 2006

It's been a while since I've posted about D and his limited diet. I still worry that he's going to develop scurvy or something, but I've pretty much come to peace with Ellyn Satter's division of labor -- we decide what food to put in front of him; he decides what he's going to eat of it. For Thanksgiving, he had a miniscule taste of the cheese biscuits and pumpkin muffins. He's decided that plain spaghetti is acceptable, so I guess we're making progress. He's active, he's happy, he's at a higher percentile on the growth curve than I was at his age, so we're trying not to worry.

As I commented to Phantom Scribbler this week, dealing with kids' food issues is incredibly frustrating, in part because everyone has really good advice. Except that, like us, she's tried almost everything you can think of, and it hasn't made a difference. (And Baby Blue isn't gaining weight, so she's under a lot more pressure than we are.)

One of the standard pieces of advice that people give is that kids will be more willing to eat different things if they're involved in cooking them. That hasn't worked so well for us. D loves to cook dinner, but only because it lets him control the menu -- so we all wind up eating peanut butter on ritz crackers, with sprinkles. So tonight, I told him that if he wants to cook dinner, it has to involve a protein and a vegetable, as well as a starch.

He promptly pulled out Pretend Soup, which a friend gave him quite a while ago and he ignored, and started perusing the recipes. We didn't have the ingredients for most of the recipes, but we did have carrots, and he said that he wanted "carrot pennies." So we sliced up a few carrots -- and miracle of miracles -- he ate some.

August 13, 2006

T was out of town for a long weekend, and I didn't want to use up vacation days just to sit around at home, so the boys and I went up the road to Baltimore overnight. We had a good trip, including visits to Port Discovery, the Aquarium, a real submarine, and a high school friend of mine. So when I asked the boys what their favorite parts of the trip were, D's immediate answer was getting to go to TWO different McDonald's. Great. At least N's pick was the dolphin show.

The two McDonald's were a study in contrasts. One was the shiny one that's attached to the atrium of Port Discovery, the other a somewhat rundown one in downtown Baltimore. We got happy meals at both places, having surrendered to the cult of the cheap plastic toys. The current boxes have PollyWorld on two sides, Hummers on two. At the shiny McDonald's, the boys got toy Hummers in them. I assume that there's also a Polly toy, but we weren't offered that option. (Please tell me that there weren't gendered versions of the Pirates of the Carribean and Cars toys we've previously received.) At the rundown one, the boxes were the same, but the boys got a Lightning McQueen and some weird rocket-propelled dragon. I have absolutely no idea what that's a tie-in to. But at the shiny one we were charged separately for the chocolate milk, while at the run-down one, they included it with the happy meals, and threw in free ice cream as a bonus.

I hate going to McDonald's twice in two days, but I'm just not up to taking the boys to a real restaurant by myself. I have to spend too much energy keeping them sitting and quiet, and they're probably going to wind up ordering chicken fingers anyway. I brought string cheese, crackers, yogurt, and muffins with us, which covered breakfast and snacks. Away from home, on my own, just isn't the right time to draw a line in the sand on the nutrition battlefront. (And yes, it often feels like a battlefront.) And I'm willing to eat their salads, which is precisely why McDonald's sells them -- it makes fast food an acceptable fallback for people for me.

The friend I visited has a 2 1/4 year old. They're pretty crunchy -- cloth diapers, a hybrid car, and the kid has only had ice cream twice in his life. I felt sort of bad bringing my kids with their love of sweets and Happy Meals toys into their house. At least their son is young enough that I don't think he quite understood what my guys were so excited about.

July 11, 2006

Today's book is The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan. It has a great deal in common with Peter Singer's book, The Way We Eat, which I discussed last month. Where Singer looked at the diets of three families -- a conventional American diet, full of processed meat, a diet where the family attempts to eat organic and humanely raised meat, and a vegan diet -- Pollan looks at four meals that he eats -- a McDonald's burger, an organic meal from large producers, a meal from Joel Salatin's Polyface farm, and a meal largely of foods that he hunted (a wild pig) or gathered (morels) himself.

Pollan begins by discussing how the vast majority of the American diet comes from corn in one form or another -- either directly processed, or fed to animals. He visits a corn farm to see how it's grown, but then points out that corn is a commodity -- you can't connect that corn to any particular cow, or any particular cow to a piece of meet. Organic food from large companies is produced in a more sustainable manner, with less chemicals, but is equally a commodity. By contrast, Polyface is a self-contained ecosystem. Salatin isn't officially "organic," but invites any of his customers to see what he's doing.

Ironically, I found Pollan's writing more preachy than Singer's, even though Singer is the professional ethicist. Singer tells you what he thinks you should do, and he tells you why. He tells you what he thinks the ideal is (not eating meat at all), and what's a good fallback position (not eating industrial farmed meat, unless there's an overriding reason to do so). Pollan doesn't ever explicitly say "you should do this" but gives the impression that he thinks he's more enlightened than you.

In the section on the meal that he hunted and gathered (which Pollan admits freely is interesting only as a one-shot exercise, not as a lifestyle), Pollan writes about the connection he felt to the food. But I was left with the impression that the true gift he received was the relationships he developed with the people who took him hunting, who taught him to find mushrooms, and who shared the meal with him. Conventionally farmed food, cooked and shared with love, can be pretty magical too.

Putting the meals together was ok, but less social than I had hoped. I think it's mostly an issue of time. I did the 12-dinner package, which costs a lot less per meal than the 8-meal package, but doesn't leave a whole lot of time for schmoozing. They want you in and out in 2 hours, and after leaving time for the orientation, putting your meals away and washing your hands between stations, and checking out, that doesn't leave a whole lot of extra time. If I do it again, I'd like to split the 12-meal package with a friend, and then we could talk while we assembled.

They have the process very well thought-out, with the appropriate measuring cup or spoon for each ingredient right there, and the staff replenishing ingredients and wiping down counters every time you turned around. The ergonomics weren't great for me -- I'm 5' even, and often found myself straining to reach things.

The process was less sensual than cooking ordinarily is. You don't actually cook anything on site, so there's no good smells coming out. And everything is prechopped, so you're mostly just scooping things into plastic bags and then squeezing the ingredients together.

The food:

I've been pleasantly surprised by the food. Of the 10 or 11 dishes that we've tried, only one of them was really disappointing -- the Chow Mein dish was just soggy. With hindsight, I should have known that stir-frying frozen vegetables was unlikely to have good results. I found one of the sauces for the steaks unbearably salty, but my husband liked it, and it wasn't incorporated into the dish, so it was easy enough for me to eat the meat without it. Everything else has been tasty and easy to prepare. And the grilled salmon was excellent -- that's a dish I probably wouldn't have had the confidence to try from a cookbook, but will make again (although probably with a different marinade).

Is it gourmet coooking? No. Is it anything that we couldn't assemble ourselves in advance? No. But has it improved the quality and variety of what we actually eat on a day to day basis? Yes. We've had a lot fewer meals of spaghetti and jarred sauce. Will I go back? Probably, especially if I can get someone to split a session with me.

June 06, 2006

Today's book is The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. I requested it from the library after reading the interview with Singer that I discussed last month. It's an exploration of the ethics of food, focusing mostly on reducing unnecessary animal suffering and environmental impacts. Singer and Mason organize their discussion around the diets of three American families: one that shops at Walmart and eats whatever is cheap, convenient and tastes good, one that shops at places like Trader Joes and Whole Foods and tries to make generally ethical choices around food even if it means paying more, and one that follows a vegan diet.

The basic argument behind The Way We Eat is that mass-produced food, especially meat, milk and eggs, is incredibly cheap because the price doesn't reflect the real costs, both in animal welfare, and in environmental damage. Singer and Mason don't think it's inherently wrong to kill an animal for food, but say that if we have to pay 10 cents an egg more in order to allow the chickens to have the room to turn around and access to grass, we ought to be willing to pay that price. (More formally, they argue that it is "speciesist" to refuse to take animal quality of life and suffering seriously.)

Overall, I found the book interesting and readable. (I was a little nervous, since I've tried reading one of Singer's other books and found it inpenetrable.) Singer's much less of a moral absolutist in this book than I was expecting. He makes a strong case for avoiding the products of factory farms, but recognizes that it may be more important in a specific case to eat your grandmother's cooking than to maintain a purist stance. He doesn't think that the benefits of genetically modified foods are worth the risks in developed countries, but notes that the calculus may be different in places where starvation is a real threat. (Although he fails to acknowledge the political problems in trying to explain why GM food is good enough for Africans if it's not good enough for Europeans.)

Singer and Mason are also willing to zing some of their allies. They suggest that it would be a good thing if we could grow cloned meat in vats, since it presumably wouldn't have any ability to suffer, a suggestion that I think would give most environmentalists the queasies. As noted in the Salon interview, Singer's not a big fan of the Eat Local movement, arguing that it may be more sustainable to buy food from far away that is transported by ship and rail than local food that is trucked to market. And they note that improved taste may be a good thing, but it is not an ethical requirement.

So, has reading this book changed my eating habits? The sections that made the most impact on me were the discussion of mass poultry production. (I was already more or less aware of the issues in beef slaughterhouses, from Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation, and I don't eat pork for other reasons.) Right after reading that section, I walked through the meat aisle at Shopper's Food Warehouse and found it hard to pick up my usual pack of boneless chicken breasts. So I left with mushrooms and bok choy, but no meat for the moo shu chicken I was thinking of making.

Later in the week, I made it over to Whole Foods (for the first time in the several months since it opened near me) and started looking at the prices. I couldn't bring myself to pay over $4 a pound for chicken that we wouldn't be able to taste very much of over the sauce, so instead I bought a small package of beef. I think the beef was slightly more per pound than the chicken, but it wasn't as proportionately more expensive than I'm used to paying for beef, if that makes sense. If I were to commit to buying only non-factory farmed meat, I definitely think the costs would help push me toward using less of it. Which Singer and Mason would approve of, of course.

May 10, 2006

In your book you say that socially responsible folks in San Francisco would do better to buy their rice from Bangladesh than from local growers in California. Could you explain?

This is in reference to the local food movement, and the idea that you can save fossil fuels by not transporting food long distances. This is a widespread belief, and of course it has some basis. Other things being equal, if your food is grown locally, you will save on fossil fuels. But other things are often not equal. California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizer that involves energy use. Bangladeshi rice takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and doesn't require artificial irrigation. It also doesn't involve as much synthetic fertilizer because the rivers wash down nutrients, so it's significantly less energy intensive to produce. Now, it's then shipped across the world, but shipping is an extremely fuel-efficient form of transport. You can ship something 10,000 miles for the same amount of fuel necessary to truck it 1,000 miles. So if you're getting your rice shipped to San Francisco from Bangladesh, fewer fossil fuels were used to get it there than if you bought it in California.

In the same vein, you argue that in the interests of alleviating world poverty, it's better to buy food from Kenya than to buy locally, even if the Kenyan farmer only gets 2 cents on the dollar.

My argument is that we should not necessarily buy locally, because if we do, we cut out the opportunity for the poorest countries to trade with us, and agriculture is one of the things they can do, and which can help them develop. The objection to this, which I quote from Brian Halweil, one of the leading advocates of the local movement, is that very little of the money actually gets back to the Kenyan farmer. But my calculations show that even if as little as 2 cents on the dollar gets back to the Kenyan farmer, that could make a bigger difference to the Kenyan grower than an entire dollar would to a local grower. It's the law of diminishing marginal utility. If you are only earning $300, 2 cents can make a bigger difference to you than a dollar can make to the person earning $30,000.

It's an interesting argument, and one that makes a fair amount of sense. (I give the majority of my charitable donations to international aid organizations on the similar grounds that the same amount of money goes a lot further in third world countries.)

What Singer misses is the what Wendell Berry describes as "the power of affection." Singer is famous for taking utilitarianism to its logical ends -- holding that if you have the power to save two lives on the other side of the earth, but it would kill your child, you have the moral obligation to do so, because two lives are more important than one. Only slightly less dramatically, he argues that it is immoral for any of us to enjoy the typical American (or European) standard of living while children are dying for want of medicines that cost pennies. (The Salon article notes that Singer gives 20% of his salary to charity, which is far more than most of us, but still way short of the moral standard that he upholds.)

Berry's response is that it's fundamentally inhuman to expect us to value strangers' lives as much as our children's, to expect us to care as much about pollution someplace that's a dot in the map as much as pollution in the pond down the road. In his list of 27 propositions about sustainability, he argues against cities and globalization because:

"XX. The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond thereach of one's love for the place one is working in, and for the things andcreatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results.An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach oflove."

I'm not willing to go as far as Berry. But I do think that the challenge for our time is that if we're going to live in a world of globalization, we need to extend the reach of our love.

So where does this leave us on food? Singer actually has a lot in common with the local foods movement. He offers a different general guideline:

"Avoid factory farm products. The worst of all the things we talk about in the book is intensive animal agriculture. If you can be vegetarian or vegan that's ideal. If you can buy organic and vegan that's better still, and organic and fair trade and vegan, better still, but if that gets too difficult or too complicated, just ask yourself, Does this product come from intensive animal agriculture? If it does, avoid it, and then you will have achieved 80 percent of the good that you would have achieved if you followed every suggestion in the book. "

May 08, 2006

I noticed over at Life Begins at 30 that they're doing the Eat Local challenge again. Their goal is, for the month of May, as much as possible, to eat only locally grown foods. The idea of eating food that is fresher, that hasn't been bred for maximum durability, that you know where it comes from, is very appealing. Of course, it's a lot more appealing in May than in November, at least in these climes. (There's a great Margaret Atwood story in which the protagonist worries that her lover, a Canadian opposed to NAFTA, will "smell the kiwi on her breath" in winter.)

And then I read this article at Mother Jones about one of the advocates of local food, Joel Salatin. I was somewhat bemused by the idea that he made Michael Pollan drive to Swoope, Virginia in order to buy one of his chickens. I'm sure it was a delicious chicken, and Pollan learned something from the trip, but the gas consumed driving down there almost certainly outweighed any environmental benefits.

Last week was T's birthday, and by trash day we had quite an impressive and slightly appalling pile of boxes from Amazon and other stores to put out on the curb. But would it have been any better for the environment for me to drive around to half a dozen stores looking for things rather than having the UPS guy able to deliver everyone's packages in one trip? I'm not sure, and I don't know how to figure it out.

Susan at Crunchy Granola had a post recently in which she asked her readers what each of us are doing to balance our needs with those of the planet. It reminded me of a book I read a while back, The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists. This book argues that there's a handful of decisions that we make that really matter from an environmental point of view -- especially where we live, how much we drive, and how much meat we eat -- and that we should pay attention to these choices and not sweat the small stuff.

March 26, 2006

The Times has an article today about those poor deluded moms who think that they're cooking when really they're just assembling.

I haven't been to Dream Dinners or Lets Dish, but I'll probably give it a try when they open their franchises near me. (So far, the only ones in the area have been in the distant suburbs.) I like to cook, but the need to figure out what I want to make, make a shopping list for T, and then find the time to actually cook before the veggies turn into limp blobs means that some weeks we wind up eating an awful lot of pasta with jarred sauce and frozen meals from Trader Joe's. The idea of having a freezer full of meals ready to go for those nights is awfully appealing. (I do wonder whether we can fit the meals in the freezer and still have room for everything else that's crammed in there. Do they assume that everyone has a stand-alone freezer?)

I was surprised by the quote from one of the founders of Dream Dinners saying that customers tend not to come in with friends after the first few times. The social aspect is definitely a big part of the appeal to me. One of my friends hosts "international dinners" every couple of months where she picks out the recipes and buys all the food and a group of us come over and cook. We make amazing meals, but the goal is not to have food to take home, but to eat it that night (although there are usually leftovers). It's a lot of fun.

In modern society, cooking is probably the domestic task that is most easily outsourced. You can pick up meals to go from every supermarket and convenience store, let alone a restaurant. The fact that people are choosing these meal assembly places over take-out is testament to the emotional appeal of home cooked meals. I think that's the real story.

December 27, 2005

The Julie/Julia Project was the first blog I ever read, back when I didn't really know what a blog was. I think someone posted a link to it on one of my email lists, several months into the project, and I read a few posts and was hooked. In it, Julie Powell documented her attempt to cook every single recipe in Volume 1 of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the course of a year. She wrote about the dishes that turned out great and the dishes that she tortured her friends with, the days when she was interviewed on television and the days when she didn't get home from work until 8 pm and had to start cooking a dish that takes at least 3 hours to cook.

So, I really wanted to like Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. But I didn't. It wasn't as funny as the blog, didn't have the detailed information about the food and, of course, didn't have the element of uncertainty that was in the blog. By the very fact that I was holding the book in my hand, I knew that Julie finished the project, got a nice book contract, and was even able to quit her crappy government job.

Maybe the book would be more compelling to someone who hadn't read the blog and so hadn't heard many of the most interesting stories already. But I'm not sure. One of the recurring themes in both the blog and the book is the crappy little kitchen that Julie had to work in. In the blog, she mentioned several times that it's so small that she had to perch her food processor on top of the trash can. That's a wonderful image, bringing the scene to life. She never uses it in the book. What happened?

Last week, Julie was quoted in the NY Times as saying that she no longer searches for herself on blogs. I hope that's true, because I feel mean for saying negative things about the book when I got so much pleasure from the blog.

October 30, 2005

The idea is that at least half of the effort of having people over for dinner is the hassle of emailing back and forth, trying to find a date that works for everyone, then hoping that no one gets stuck working late and the kids stay healthy. This hassle can be largely overcome by just saying "Ok, standing invitation for dinner on Tuesday night. If you can't make it this week, come next." The menus are centered on the sort of low-fuss dishes that can be cooked in large batches as easily as in small (and that freeze well if no one shows up some week). And it will be good for us to have a precipitating event that forces us to vacuum the cat hair off the living room furniture once a week.

I'm serious about the invitation. Since we can't guarantee that we'll be home every single Tuesday evening, I'm making a list to send everyone whose interested a weekly notice of a) whether we're on and b) what's for dinner (this week, it's homemade pizza). If you're in the greater DC area and would like to be added to the list, send me an email.

October 09, 2005

After a month of almost no rain, it's been cold and rainy all weekend. Yesterday we had one of D's friends over for a sleepover, and went to the Children's Rain Garden in Arlington and saw the new Wallace and Gromit movie. Today, we had pancakes for breakfast, and then the boys ran all over the house hunting rabbits. We ran a few errands after the friend went home, and then T and I were pretty much wiped.

D was actually quite intrigued by the game, even though it's about as basic as you can get. (I suspect kids in the official target age range (6-12) would be bored stiff.) The only big problem we had was that it really did require one of us to sit with him the whole time and read the choices, so it didn't give us quite as much of a break as we had hoped. On the nutritional front, I'd rate it about a B:

It did help us talk to D about the need to eat a bigger variety of foods, including some vegetables. We've been floundering a bit trying to explain to him why we don't want him to eat peanut butter on graham crackers for 3 meals a day, even if it is a reasonably healthy food.

He was willing to try a carrot stick at dinner this evening. He only ate about 2 bites of it, but he claimed to like it. So that's a good thing.

On the negative side:

They were pushing the low-fat options pretty hard, including praising a choice of non-fat chocolate milk over the 2% fat milk that we serve the boys. Given the overall mix of his diet, the fat is a better choice than the extra sugar.

The options listed for the "meat and beans" category were pretty limited. They didn't seem to count peanuts and peanut butter toward it, and they rarely provided eggs as an option. Those are pretty big sources of protein for our kids.

There was essentially no discussion of portion size. And at the "official" portion size, almost anything can fit into a balanced diet -- even burgers and fries. But almost no one eats that little of them at a sitting.

April 28, 2005

A few months ago, when Moxie solicited Bad Mommy/Daddy Confessions, she was looking for one-time horrors, and explicitly ruled out ongoing failings. But, truth be told, I spend a lot more mental and emotional energy worrying about the fact that D doesn't eat any vegetables than about the time I turned my back on him in the grocery cart and he fell on his head. The fall scared the heck out of me at the time, but he survived, and I know that even the best parents have occasional lapses of that sort. But deep down, I'm convinced that my son's eating habits are a sign of my failure.

Things D will eat these days include all sorts of breads, muffins, pancakes and waffles. Milk, juice, yogurt smoothies (sometimes). Raisins. Cheese. Fish sticks (sometimes). Scrambled eggs (sometimes). Chicken "dinosaurs" and nuggets. Ice cream, cookies, and cake. But not icing. Pizza crusts but not the part with sauce. Hot dogs, although he prefers the bun with nothing on it. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Peanut butter, but not jelly. Apple slices when offered by his friend's mother, but not when offered by me. That's about it. He used to like blueberries, but won't eat them now. He's the only 4 year old I've ever heard of who won't eat plain spaghetti, no butter or sauce. Pretty much the only fruit or vegetables he consumes are what we put into the muffins. So we make a lot of muffins.

I've read Ellyn Satter's terrific How to Get Your Kid To Eat -- But Not Too Much and generally try to follow its principles. We do more "short-order cooking" (e.g. microwaving one of his preferred foods) than she recommends, but the alternative would be his eating just bread for multiple meals, which doesn't seem like an improvement. We give him stars for trying new foods; five stars earn him small toys that he covets. Last weekend, he threw up after we insisted that he take a single bite of mashed potatoes at the seder if he wanted any desert.

Is D overweight? No. If anything, he's on the skinny side. If one of his preferred foods isn't available, he'll generally do without eating. He's active and healthy, so we try not to worry too much.

Meanwhile N, at 18 months, will eat pretty much anything he can swallow. He loves tomatoes, and screams with frustration if I try to eat one in front of him without sharing. The only food I can think of that he's rejected outright is avocado. And -- I swear -- we haven't done anything differently with the two boys. If anything, N's been exposed to more convenience foods. Go figure.

"What you feed a newborn baby during the first week of life could be critical in deciding whether that baby grows up to be obese, U.S. researchers said on Monday."

and later explained:

"Writing in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, they said each additional 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of weight gained during the first eight days of life increased a baby's risk of becoming an overweight adult by about 10 percent."

It sounds like this is a pure correlational study. If that's the case, I'm not convinced that this is about anything the parents do or don't do. I could make an argument that this might mean, instead, that even in the first week, humans have different thresholds for when they feel "full."

February 06, 2005

As it turns out, we finished well under our $434.40 budget. Our total spending on food groceries totalled just $340.84, with just under $40 in purchased meals (including one full dinner, one fancy coffee, and a couple of lunches at the very cheap cafeteria down the street from my office). Even if I accounted at a fair price for the spices and such that we didn't have to pay for because they're in my basic pantry, we'd make it in under budget.

Following the suggestions of some of the commenters, I drove out to the Grand Mart supermarket on Little River Turnpike last weekend, which serves a largely Asian clientele. I was mindboggled by the array of vegetables they offered -- four different kinds of eggplant (American, Italian, Thai and Japanese) -- and the prices. If someone can explain to me why Giant or Shoppers can't have half as good produce for twice the price, I'd be very grateful. Unfortunately, after I had loaded up my cart and got on line, the manager announced that their computers were down, they couldn't run the cash registers without them, and the store was closing. And I didn't have the time or energy to return later in the week.

We ate pretty close to our typical diet, although a bit heavier on the eggs and homemade pizza than an average month. Although I didn't track it, I'm sure we didn't come anywhere near meeting the food pyramid recommendations for fruit and vegetables. I'm not sure we do that much better in mid-winter even when we're not on a budget, as I find the seasonal offerings awfully uninspiring. (Although worries about the budget did stop me from buying some of my usual mid-winter healthy treats, like frozen cherries.)

The time-money tradeoff was a big factor in the budget, both in the shopping (do I make a separate trip to another store that has a better price on specific items?) and in the preparation (is the two dollars saved buying regular spinach v. the prewashed stuff worth the time involved in preparing it?). And I truly can't imagine doing this if I didn't have access to a car, or had to bring my kids along on every single shopping trip. (Shopping with kids can be much more expensive, both because you don't want to spend the extra time studying price labels when they're getting restless and because they constantly ask for things that aren't on the shopping list.)

Although I wasn't tracking our expenditures on non-food items, this experiment made me much more aware of all of our spending. Friday we took D. to the doctor because his cough was getting worse, and came home with a nebulizer and two kinds of medicine. Even with our quite good insurance, the copays totalled $60. For us, that's not a terribly big deal. But if every dollar that comes in is already spent, an unexpected expense like that has to come out of somewhere. And food is almost always the most flexible part of poor families' budgets. That, rather than the cost of food, is why so many American families are "food insecure"

January 28, 2005

I'm amazed at the attention this little experiment has gotten; I'vegottenmorelinkstoitthan any other post, including many that I thought were much more interesting. I guess it's because there are lots of people pontificating on the internet, and many fewer trying to match what they eat to what they say. The discussion here was particularly interesting.

So, when I left off, we had spent $163.24 on groceries, $191.49 including purchased meals, $182.62 including cat food and laundry soap. We spent about $87 on groceries in the past week: $29 at Shoppers Food Warehouse for frozen grape juice concentrate, graham crackers, soda (for the birthday party that wound up being cancelled due to sick kids), milk, spaghetti sauce, mozzarella cheese (for pizza); $37 at Costco for peanut butter, eggs, bread, spaghetti sauce, cheddar cheese, and dino buddies; and $21 at Giant for milk and taco fixings. Current grocery total: $249.12, or $277.37 with purchased meals. Including things like cat food, pedialyte, tylenol and cleaning supplies, we're at $340.09.

I'm fascinated by how defensive I could feel myself getting as I read some of the comments that suggested ways in which we could cut our grocery budget further, even though the goal of this experiment was never to spend the absolute minimum possible.

I'm quite surprised by Amy's statement that she's able to buy organic food for $250/month or less -- the stores that sell organic food around here are VERY expensive. Even when I'm not trying to stick to the Thrifty Food Plan, I find it painful to buy wild salmon at $14 a pound when I can get farmed salmon (even if full of PCBs) for $3.99 a pound. Amy, if you're still reading, I'd love examples of what things cost where you shop.

Someone else ("PGC-ist") suggested a bunch of different chains that he said were cheaper, but Shoppers Food Warehouse is the only one of them that has a store anywhere near me. I enjoy cooking, so am willing to spend 20 minutes making muffins or waffles rather than buying them at the store, but I'm not willing to spend an extra hour driving around the Beltway in order to save a few dollars. And if I didn't have a car, they'd be totally out of consideration.

One of the goals of the experiment was to see how trying to stick to this budget affected the quality of our diet. Bean soup is cheap, healthy and filling, but its appeal wears somewhat thin after several days in a row. Fresh vegetables have been surprisingly expensive -- the ground turkey for our tacos was only $2.67, but peppers, lettuce and plum tomatoes were another $5. I always have a harder time eating the recommended servings of fruit and vegetables during the winter than during the summer, and this project has made that worse, because I think they're overpriced.

January 20, 2005

As previously discussed, we're tracking our grocery spending this month to see how hard it is for us to stay within the limits of USDA's Thrifty Food Plan, which allows up to $434.40 per month for a family of our size.

For the record, I don't think this gives us a real feel for what it's like to be poor, any more than making teenagers carry around an egg or a sack of flour for a month gives them real insight into what it's like to be a parent. I know that it makes a huge difference not to really have to worry that my kids are going to go hungry if I don't leave enough money for the last week. But it's a useful consciousness raising exercise.

When I last updated, we had spent $112.38 on food. This week we've mostly been doing quick grocery runs when we're running out of food, and haven't really done meal planning. Friday I spent $8.90 on milk, bread, eggs and tea at Trader Joe's. Monday, I went to Giant, and spent $23.90 on rolls, bread, cheese, milk, eggs, butter, spinach, graham crackers, grape juice, and ice cream. Today, we spent $22.95 on milk, chicken and veggies for stir fry, flour, cake mix (D's birthday is next week and the party is Sunday), and chocolate and marshmallows (D talked us into making s'mores). So, our current total is $163.24, or $182.62 if we include the cat food and laundry detergent (which are pretty much necessities, but are not legitimate uses of food stamps). Not too bad for halfway. Except that I also went out to dinner with friends on Sunday, and then we bought part of our lunch on Monday, and I bought lunch at work on Tuesday. So add another $28.25 to the total, for $210.87, just barely under half the budget.

A few comments about some of the choices that we've made this week.

Mostly, we're eating the way we normally do, although with slightly less prepared foods. I've made muffins and coffee cake from scratch, but that's something I do semi-regularly in any case.

We're eating more eggs than usual, but some of that is because we've just discovered that the 15 month old adores them, and once we're scrambling them for him, it's easy to make them for us too.

I've been stunned at how much variation there is in the price of milk across stores. The least we've paid for a gallon of milk is $2.35 at Shoppers Food Warehouse (cheaper than Costco); the most we've paid is $3.99 (at Giant). I also don't understand why 2% milk is so much cheaper than whole milk. This is likely to affect our shopping patterns even after the month is over.

Monday, I was shopping with D and I let him convince me to buy ice cream, since Breyer's was on sale for $2.50 for a half gallon. But when we got through the checkout lane, I saw that I had been charged the full price for it. I went to the manager, who told me that only some flavors were on sale. I returned the half gallon I had been charged $5.29 for, and would have left the store, but D was saying "you said we could get ice cream" and was about to burst into tears. So we got a package of the other flavor, got back on line, and got it. I probably wouldn't have bothered if I weren't watching the budget -- at least not with D in tow.

The most basic insight I've had is about how much of a privilege it is to be able to shop and not pay attention to the total cost of what's in your cart. I've never been one to shop for anything without paying attention to the price -- I scrutinize unit price labels with the best of them -- but if I'm confident that each individual item is a reasonable buy, I generally don't worry about what the total is going to be. That's had to change this month.

Unfortunately, it's no longer available for free on the New York Times website, but last summer, Adrian Nichole LeBlanc, author of Random Family (reviewed here), had a fascinating article in the magazine section about grocery shopping and attitudes towards money. She wrote:

"That afternoon, I was trailing my book's main subject, Lolli, as she bought the month's groceries. She was a teenager, pregnant, homeless and already the mother of two children. Her young family subsisted on food stamps and vouchers from the federal subsidy program, WIC. The shield of my judgment rose when she passed right by the C-Town weekly discount flier and made her way down the dirty aisles with her shopping cart. She just grabbed things -- packs of chicken legs and pork chops, bags of sugar and rice, bottles of vegetable oil; in went cans of beans and tins of Spam. I stood, stunned, as she reached for the individual-portion cartons of juice -- with their brightly colored miniature straws -- ignoring the larger, economy-size bottles. No calculation of unit price, no can'ts or shoulds or ought-not-to's, no keen eye to the comparative ounce. By the time her stuffed cart reached the checkout line, my unease was turning into anger. Didn't she know she was poor?"

LeBlanc notes that one of the emotions fueling her anger was envy -- neither she nor her parents had ever shopped that way, as they had scrimped and squeezed the grocery budget in order to save for college. But she also acknowledges that it's hard to imagine that any amount of scrimping was going to bring Lolli and her family a noticably better future.

January 10, 2005

Since my husband did a Costco run on Friday, I'm going to retroactively start our month on the Thrifty Food Plan then, as otherwise our spending this week would be artificially low. (I recognize that most poor people don't have the extra money for a Costco membership, and many don't have the car to get them there. We don't do that much of our shopping there, as we don't have much storage space, so I don't think it should distort the results too much.)

Costco 1/7/05

Skim Milk

2.45

Whole Milk

3.05

Quaker bars

9.49

Potato rolls

3.69

Brisket

15.65

6 pounds spaghetti

5.79

Dirt cup kit

2.97

Chicken sausage

12.59

White cheddar

6.29

Cat food

13.69

After tax, that brings us to $64.45; $78.14 if you count the cat food.

Giant 1/9/05

Eggs

3.19

Skim milk 1/2 gal

2.19

Skim milk 1/2 gal

2.19

Worcester Sauce

1.29

Chicken

6.43

Ginger

0.46

Tax

0.63

16.38

Ok, we're up to $80.83 without catfood/$94.52 with it.

Sunday I did a mini-run to Giant for split peas (I was sure we had them in the house, but we didn't) and onions. I can't find the receipt, but it was under $4. Say $84.83; $98.52 for simplicity. So we've pretty much blown our first week's budget, but we've got lots of food still in the house. We'll probably need to buy milk (we go through a ludicrous amount of milk), but otherwise I think we're in decent shape.

Food is mindbogglingly cheap in the US today, accounting for a smaller portion of people's overall budgets than ever before. In fact, this is one of the big problems with the official definition of poverty. Mollie Orshansky, who developed the measure in the 1960s, found that the average family spent about 1/3 of its income on food; the poverty measure was thus set at three times the cost of an economy food plan.

So why are some families struggling to buy food? Because other necessities have gotten more expensive, especially housing. Many low-income families spend 50 percent or more of their incomes on housing; if they don't want to be evicted or have their gas shut off, they pay their rent and utility bills first and whatever is left over is available for food.

Is healthy food more expensive than unhealthy food? Yes and no. It's certainly true that you can prepare nutritious and inexpensive meals, especially if you minimize use of meat. But if you want quick and easy meals -- and if you're a busy parent at any income level, you want quick and easy meals -- healthy food is a lot more expensive than fast food or a candy bar from the store on the corner. And if you're looking at a vending machine, the soda is usually half the price of the juice. (And let's not even get into the cost of organic food.)

It's also true that food is an easy way for low-income parents to indulge their children (and themselves). If you're poor, you spend a lot of time saying No. No, you can't have that. No, we can't afford that. No, you can't go there. McDonald's is an affordable treat, something you can say Yes to.

The Thrifty Food Plan for a family of 4 (with 2 young children) is $434.40 and I honestly think that we spend less than that most months. But we also eat out occasionally, which would blow that budget quickly. I also know that it's cheaper to buy food if you have enough money to buy in bulk and to stock up on groceries when they're on sale, which we do. I'm thinking of tracking our groceries 100% for a month and seeing if we can stay under it. Anyone want to join me?